HttpFox

A few months ago, I worked on a project where the request originating on browser was to be transferred to a whole different server farm. The project involved Apache webserver, GWT, Tomcat servers, of course some configuration in each of these layers. The Firefox Extention that really helped me was - HttpFox. This extension allows us to see the originating request. In the case of GWT, one can see the request type, its parameters. We can observe the response from the server. Sometimes just the response code is more helpful than any logs on the server side. One can see the URL that we are hitting. In our case, it was crucial to construct right URL so that we know we reach to the right farm of servers.


I used the same extension two months ago when I had to reverse engineer a working URL. I needed to find how the URL is generated and what does it translate to. This extension was really really helpful. I had finished debugging in 15 minutes from the time I started. If you are using Firefox 3.6 and cannot download this extension using firefox, try downloading it manually. It worked for me.

Next time you have to develop/reverse engineer anything that deals with URL's, fire up this one. Good luck!